ResoluteReader: Adam Higginbotham - Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Adam Higginbotham - Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space

The first time I went to the United States in the very early 1990s, when I told anyone I was a space and astronomy enthusiast, everyone wanted to tell me their recollections of January 28, 1986. It was a seminal moment for that period, and perhaps the most important collective event for American citizens until September 11 2001. The Challenger disaster was particularly poignant and memorable because it was the flight which promised to make the possibility of the ordinary person in space more than just a dream. Christa McAuliffe was an ordinary teacher on board the mission, and she, alongside six other astronauts died several minutes after a leak on one of the shuttle's booster rockets exploded the fuel in the main tank.

In the aftermath of the disaster NASA came under extreme scrutiny. The Roger's Commission set up by the US President to investigate what happened declared it "an accident rooted in history". They singled out how a succession of choices made by senior managers at the company that manufactured the booster rockets and NASA bureaucrats combined to give the go ahead for launch on a day when temperatures made failure of the crucial O-Ring component very likely. This was despite the energetic and powerful opposition for key rocket engineers.

But Adam Higginbotham makes it very clear that the "history" of the shuttle, and the potential for disaster began many years before 1986. His account of the development of the shuttle as a break from the Apollo programme was rooted in the US government's desire to make regular space usage cheap and profitable - as well as a key component of the US's military strategy. Despite the enormous technical difficulties of a reusable spacecraft, Nasa was driven to make a vehicle that could be reused, with senious figures and politicians daydreaming of weekly flights. But cost cutting, out-sourcing, design flaws and extraordinary political pressure to get the Shuttle aloft meant a series of technical shortcomings and potential floors were made. In addition, as Higginbotham repeatedly points out, decisions about flights were often made under pressure - not the immediate pressure of a politician on the phone, but an internal pressure caused by NASA culture.

Higginbotham's book is very much the biography of a number of key individuals. The lives and training of the astronauts is told in detail which means the disaster, which you know is coming, is very personal. But it also serves to highlight the horror that results from budget cuts and bureaucratic pressure. But also here are the accounts of the engineers, some of whom never recovered from their failure to stop the flight and several of whom made enormous sacrifices to expose the shortcomings and failures that led to Challenger's explosion.

For a teenager obsessed with space, the Shuttle programme was shiny and inspiring. Challenger makes it clear that in many ways it was a sordid, overly expensive, project that could never deliver on early promises. That's not to detract from its potential, but to recognise that a system that puts profits before people and places national prestige above safety and rational planning, will only ever deliver space programmes that eventually cost lives. Tragically the deaths of the seven Challenger astronauts where followed in 2003 of a futher seven astronauts as Columbia exploded on re-entry. The investigation after that disaster found that few lessons had been learnt in the long term, and failures of communication and leadership overruled the safety decisions that could have saved lives. While Higgenbotham's excellent book is about Challenger, it is also very much about how organisational corner cutting can be deadly. The details may often be technical, but the story is very human.